(from my peers) the MO for those who want to leave seems to be slacking until PIP/Focus/Pivot (for the payout) while looking for outside opportunities. There are a ton of companies out there that meet your criteria, but you’ll have to do some digging. YMMV
I know someone at IC level there who hasn't done actual work in many months. There is literally no work because their old team was cut and they haven't found a new one yet. They are just collecting paychecks until an eventual (hopeful) layoff and severance package.
Some VP's still need to show headcount to justify their own jobs?
I believe this could happen, but find it hard to believe it would last a few months. The systems would auto-assign them a manager. That manager would be getting reports on their productivity, and would have them in their list of people they have to give ratings to. At this point they would have gone through a mid-cycle stack ranking.
Unless their current manager is colluding with them, they would have been ranked into a pip by now.
FWIW, there are lots of comments here calling you a sucker (or saying words to that effect without the name calling), and I'm here to say the opposite.
I think it's good that you have an independent sense of what's 'right' and 'wrong' for you to do, and you follow your internal moral compass on big decisions in your life. Your personal integrity should not depend on the integrity of who/whatever it is you're dealing with.
I'm really torn here. It feels like a good thing for society if everyone has that attitude of "do the right thing".
But I also feel that it's important not to be naive: the sad/harsh reality is that there are people and bodies and organisations out there who will exploit others, and will use their gains to further carry on exploiting.
Now obviously, "exploiting" here is paying huge salaries, shiny offices etc. but I think HN is generally in agreement that Amazon is one of those organisations that regularly oversteps the mark with employee rights/respect.
If we accept that, then I have a really hard time shaking the idea that responding to them making employees lives hard by continuing to perform above average is no different to appeasing an alligator.
What if employers exploit employees because they know there will always be employees who respond to it like this? It kind of makes sense. If we accept that, then all of a sudden "I'm doing the right thing of working hard for my own moral compass" becomes "I'm helping the bad guys because, because it makes me feel better".
Again, I'm aware that thinking about this in terms of "exploitation" and "suckers" is a little extreme, but thinking about it in terms of incentives: isn't this person letting their moral compass incentivise a behaviour they object so much to that they're looking to leave?
edit: for clarity, I do hugely respect working hard for personal motivation of "doing the right thing", and I have taken this approach before. But when I got older, and reflected, I concluded I let my own ego enable things which make the world a worse place, which is a bigger no-no for me personally. It does need to be balanced off against falling into an almost paranoia of "is this person/group just trying to exploit me".
Agreed. The game "tit for tat" requires you actually tit if you get a tat. The tit and tat can last a "long time" for the human mind which is not relevant to the game structure. The mind may also "feel bad" about the tit.
> The game "tit for tat" requires you actually tit if you get a tat.
My understanding is that in iterated prisoner's dilemma, "tit for two tats" will often outperform "tit for tat", so in its original setting that's not really the case.
Here in reality, of course, "tit for two tats" can be better exploited if it can be (easily enough) identified and there are more potential ways of doing that.
100% agree. Never compromise on what is part of your character build. It's not about them, it's all about you, your mental health, and your career trajectory.
> Your personal integrity should not depend on the integrity of who/whatever it is you're dealing with
I disagree, because sometimes your integrity might justify their behavior. People do bad things because they think they're good, and they think they're good because people tell them via their actions.
Being a good employee tells amazon their employment policies are fair, and they should continue them. Therefore, IMO, you not only should be a bad employee - you have a duty to be a bad employee.
Personal integrity should not ever be in play when you’re talking about amoral objects like Amazon.
When I command my computer to remove a file, I don’t think about the morality of destroying things. I issue the command and it does it. And I know my computer doesn’t care about personal integrity as it churns through its instructions. Amazon works the same way.
These companies are all lawn mowers, just like Oracle. A lawn mower just cuts grass and does not deserve or respond to things like integrity and personal honor.
While it may be comforting to think you're just sticking it to "Amazon", if you look at almost anything you're doing, you're going to see other people who are really at the other end of this apathy. Whether it's co-workers you're blocking or giving half-effort to, customers being ignored, or the new engineer that is neglected.
Is there some purely "amoral object like Amazon" stuff that's part of it too? Sure. But at least in my experience, folks who are just phoning it in cause real stress for coworkers and others, and that definitely relates to personal integrity.
Man, all of that sounds awful for those coworkers and customers. But it isn't GPs problem. It isn't their company. He doesn't employ them. He isn't responsible for their experience. Put the blame on their poor experience squarely where it belongs: management. Why is shitty management letting some underperformer ruin things? Super convenient to claim personal integrity and shift the blame to the underperformer when management is clearly not demonstrating personal integrity and protecting their team and customers.
That's a good point: demotivating people and making them leave, having all those side effects on bystanders... it's all coming from the management decision.
And this is Amazon, they are normally so careful about mental suffering of coworkers... ...
They are small in a sense and vast in a sense. You may know some people personally but never interact with them at work even though in theory your systems are adjacent.
A company doesn’t physically exist, the reality is people interacting with each others. People are not responsible for others whole experience, but certainly for their actions. You can’t hide behind non-existent things, you are having a real interaction in the real world and impacting real people. Otherwise it leads to systemic evil.
I think the prior commenter’s point might be more clearly stated as “why hold rank and file employees responsible for overall conditions within the company, rather than those actually responsible for overall conditions within the company [management].”
A person doesn’t physically exist. It’s just a bunch of cells interacting with each other. Likewise a cell doesn’t really exist, it’s just a bunch of proteins and lipids, but likewise those are just a bunch of atoms, which are just a bunch of subatomic particles!
Anyhow, corporations exist just as much as any other collective entity and have their own behavioral norms.
A persons conduct says more about their character in situations when they don't need to be nice, when there won't even be any consequence for not being nice.
One could prompt their local LLM with some psychopathic verbal abuse-- "Do it or I drill a hole in your skull!!!" -- you don't need to be nice to the LLM, it doesn't have feelings or memory, etc. The LLM doesn't deserve your kindness or benefit from it. But if you do this often can you really be sure that it will have no effect on how you treat people, or how you think of yourself?
And corporations are a lot more human than some LLM-- they're made of people, they pay people, they buy from people, they're owned by people. Abusing them can harm people, though, sure it doesn't always. You can't always tell when it will harm people, and your reasoning may not be the most unbiased when your own personal benefit is on the other side of the equation.
But even if it didn't matter, that no humans would be hurt. Do you want to push yourself towards the kind of person who will behave in an exploitive way when they can get away with it? Or do you want to be the kind of person who is confident enough in their own merit that they can play life on a slightly harder mode and walk past 'opportunities' that are less obviously upstanding?
People constantly set goals for themselves that go above and beyond what is required of them because it helps develop their skill, their character, or because their wiliness to face the challenge forms part of their identity.
In any case, I'm not judging anyone here-- just offering a different perspective.
However it's not a boolean choice, since OP has a third option: change workplace. Which is exactly what they are seeking to do and demonstrates their integrity.
> When theres money on the table you don't have any friends.
That's taking it way too far.
I think the important factor is the kind of relationship involved, specifically how does a modern corporation like Amazon view its relationship with you. I'd argue that it's fundamentally sociopathic and exploitative, so it doesn't deserve anything better than what it gives.
Individuals and different kinds of organizations can be deserving of your integrity.
Integrity is about moral vision. Either your moral vision will become moral reality or it will become moral wishfulness. Reality is how you hold your morality accountable as something more than a story you tell yourself.
"What you think of Oracle, is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle. And I gotta say, as someone who has seen that complexity for my entire life, it's very hard to get used to that idea. It's like, 'surely this is more complicated!' but it's like: Wow, this is really simple! This company is very straightforward, in its defense.
This company is about one man, his alter-ego, and what he wants to inflict upon humanity -- that's it! ...Ship mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off, screw our customers, and make a whole shitload of money.
Yeah... you talk to Oracle, it's like, 'no, we don't fucking make dreams happen -- we make money!'
...You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle."
OP is more like Schindler, who was part of the system but didn't actually produce shells. Schindler was a net negative for the system and most likely a net positive for humanity.
Your computer physically exists, just as your lawn mower. Amazon and Oracle on the other end just exist in our minds. Physically it’s just people interacting with each other. So for me personal integrity depends on each specific interaction.
My hard drive is just magnetic domains, but I still interact with files. Constructs can be interacted with. I can also bang my head on the car door, even though both are actually just atoms.
Seems ironic to be working for a company without integrity, drawing a salary ie your livelihood from such an organization while believing somehow your personal integrity is not already impacted by doing so. The two seem incompatible to an outside observer.
Maybe. Later than if he quits, and maybe not if they reverse their position like they've done a few times already. If he quits right away he's guaranteeing he doesn't have that job.
employment is just a business transaction, i don't believe people should tie their sense of integrity to how they interact with an organization that would fire you with zero notice and not even tell you why
Integrity doesn't vary based on the actions of other people.
A better move would be to use the networking opportunity to find other high-performance people who don't like the BS, and form a productish-consultingish worker-owned co-op to replace the soulless, erratic corporation with a more stable, humane environment.
I filed a formal complaint Brian O was breaching fiduciary duty in the 10-K and was subsequently fired unceremoniously for my “performance” by two directors on a call the next morning.
Amazon tried to hire me back 6 months later, from multiple recruiters. My former manager and I had a good laugh that somehow I wasn’t blacklisted.
"Amazon" may not, but the manager, VP, SVP etc may. Careers aren't made by having the right skillset. They're made by having the right set of contacts. YMMV
Sure, but someone leaving on bad terms (especially if they’re relatively junior) isn’t super likely to be one of those people eh? They call it ‘burning bridges’ for a reason.
This may also be the case for URA (unregrettable attribution?). Someone I know left just short of two years for personal reasons, was never put in PIP/Focus, and then they tried joining a new team after and was told when they left their manager put them as URA, which prevents them from coming back. I've heard it can just be a year, though.
Unregretted attrition, which means you no longer work there and you're not sorry about it.
Which means you are the one with the power in the negotiation (the party with the most power is the one who needs the other the least).
So they have a codified sour grapes rule to punish people who they don't have power over? To punish people who weren't begging to please continue being allowed to work there? That is actual insanity right there.
Have you ever dated someone that you can’t quite break up with for whatever reason, and weren’t bad necessarily, but still breath a sigh of relief that it’s over when they dump you?
The work equivalent to that is a URA, for a manager.
If you’re that manager and now ‘single’ (have open headcount) and looking to find someone to ‘date’, would you hire that person back, or go find someone else - even if they were a complete question mark?
If hiring managers/recruiters have more candidates than they can handle, a prior URA can impact a candidate the same way. ‘There are many fish in the sea’
Does that mean you’d never get hired back? Nah, it happens. But it isn’t likely to help.
My understanding of URA, is that it's when a manager is able to manage a person into leaving the job that they can't justify firing, but really don't want on the team. So then the person leaves, and is flagged as we didn't want to keep them anyway.
A thought experiment, something you may not want to hear. Have you thought of playing along and see if you would actually like going back to office full time? Also, while you are at office 5 days a week, how about try to get to the next level before you switch? Many will leave (just like you are planning to) and hence it will be easier for the long timers to get promoted in an environment where there will be a lot of inflow of new employees at all levels.
I am not suggesting that this is the right way to think about your situation, but that it is 'another way' to think about it. Who knows, you might end up profiting from this adversity. Wish you all the best!
It’s not always that easy. Many people over the last few years have reorganised their life under the expectation of continued hybrid working, and can’t trivially reorganise it back to full time.
I am one of these naive people who expected happy home office forever. It bit me hard, because I bought an old house outside of big city and spent the time I would need to commute renovating it. The return to the office happened, I quit. The other place was weird. It advertised generous home office ruling. But under very special manager home office was forbidden. It was just too stupid to file a complaint to HR and I left. So my construction site was stuck for 1,5 years and it was very stressful.
Found by accident a job near my home. Small company with private office for me and unlimited home office ruling. Use home office only when I am ill. During this period I found out, that I absolutely love my private office and hate daily commuting and open offices.
I remember being surprised during the pandemic just how many people were uprooting their lives and moving to remote locations. Even though there has been a trend towards remote work over the previous decade I always thought there would be a bounce back and some of those people would be stuffed.
"supposed to" depends on the company. The company I was working at announced immediately that we were work from home forever. They canceled leases on over a dozen offices across the world and let us come in and take the old furniture.
But you're not forced to work for a company that wants you in the office, you're free to seek employment elsewhere that matches your remote requirements similar how a company isn't forced to hire remote workers only. You are both free to choose the best options that fit your demands if you can find them.
Jobs and employers aren't for life. If you uprooted and reorganize your whole life based on the circumstances of a once in a lifetime global pandemic expecting things to stay like that forever, you've done goofed.
That’s not a good take. Compare/contrast: “but you’re not forced to work for a company that wants you to work in hazardous conditions without safety gear”. That’s far different from RTO, but the point is that there’s a huge power imbalance here and it’s not as simple as saying “don’t work there if you’re not happy with […]”.
IMHO, yours is not a good take. I get it, I also like to WFH if I can instead of commuting, but working from the office is not the same as working with hazardous substances both legally and as a apples to apples take.
Working in hazardous environments is outlawed (unless proper care is taken), working from the office is not outlawed. If you want working from the office to be outlawed as a health hazard you'll have to convince the government to do that as part of OHSA and labor laws but good luck getting any workers' sympathy that commuting to work in your cushy air conditioned office is not to your taste from the likes of those doing landscaping or roofing.
Otherwise we can stretch the definition endlessly to working with Windows, Agile, Scrum, Teams and Jira is a health hazard and should be also outlawed because I just don't like them, but me not liking something is not enough to make it outlawed.
Yep, those are indeed not the same thing, and that’s why I said they’re not the same thing. The point was that “if you don’t like it, leave” is a terrible reply to any complaint about a working environment. Especially when things like insurance are bizarrely tied to employment, a huge portion of people can’t just leave.
>“if you don’t like it, leave” is a terrible reply to any complaint about a working environment.
Why is it a terrible reply? What should you do if you don't like your job? What's your point here?
Most people on the planet do jobs they don't like, welcome to reality. Otherwise we'd all be racecar drivers, twitch streamers, musicians and painters and get paid for our hobbies, but that's not how it works for most people.
We do a job not because we always like it or like everything about it, we do it to pay for food, shelter and if money allows, to afford hobbies and leisure that make life nice. Venting on the internet won't improve societal issues or issues you have at your job, it's still up to you to change your situation to what fits you because nobody will do it for you.
That's not true - you just talked about OSHA. What did they do before that? They did what you advocate - they left, or maybe lost a hand or two. Then we got this codified and boom! Now somebody else does it for you (thank god).
It's not just about like/dislike. There are real impacts. Thousands of tons of CO2, lives lost in car accidents, countless human lifespans wasted on a commute. These are real impact that you, yes YOU, will face head on.
Friendly reminder that remote work in IT was a thing way before the pandemic. I for one started working from home full time in 2015.
Also your approach seems to be to just accept whatever employers throw at you. Have you considered that they might be colluding (in a sense) to deprive you of options?
I would like to know a rational reason why I should spend so much of my day travelling.
>Also your approach seems to be to just accept whatever employers throw at you.
Where do you see me saying such a thing?
>I would like to know a rational reason why I should spend so much of my day travelling.
Companies say it's for "better collaboration". You would do it if you had no other options if every potential employer would require you to be on site depriving you of remote options, but because the market is in your favor giving you options, it's difficult for you to empathize with the other situation.
Your solution appears to be "choose a different employer" without any hint of "demand more from the current employer".
> You would do it if you had no other options if every potential employer would require you to be on site depriving you of remote options, but because the market is in your favor giving you options, it's difficult for you to empathize with the other situation.
You assume something that's not the case. I am of the opinion that everyone who can, should have this option regardless of the market situation and I think it's terrible people are forced to commute. It's like paid leave or health insurance - an achievement in workers' rights.
>Your solution appears to be "choose a different employer" without any hint of "demand more from the current employer".
That's only what you implied, not what I said. If simply demanding stuff from your current employer would just work then there wouldn't be so many unhappy workers everywhere. But that's not it works in the real world. The only language employers understand is the "F you, I quit" part.
>I am of the opinion that everyone who can, should have this option regardless of the market situation
That's nice but how do you propose that to happen? Did you see any workers rioting on the streets to have remote work as a guaranteed labor right? No? Then you can forget about it.
All rights and perk that labor currently has, like the 8h workday, free healthcare, paid vacation days, paid sick leave, have been won only through blood and conflict. It's not like your government is ever gonna hold a referendum and ask workers how many paid vacation days do you want to have and everyone gets to choose. If you want change you need to fight for it, physically with violent force, otherwise you'll be at the mercy of the "free market" which may or may not be in your favor depending how the wind blows. Perks aren't just gonna fall out of the sky for the working class, ever. The covid years were a fluke.
>If you want change you need to fight for it, physically with violent force, otherwise you'll be at the mercy of the "free market" which may or may not be in your favor depending how the wind blows. Perks aren't just gonna fall out of the sky for the working class, ever. The covid years were a fluke.
Which I think is very unfortunate, because working from home is a huge benefit to people who want to, while not being an actual cost to employers (in my opinion, not in theirs).
The part I'm struggling to understand, and please be honest here, is you almost sound a little smug that people are being made to return to the office. Maybe you have a good reason for that, or maybe I'm misreading your tone?
Not sure why you're being downvoted. Unless the employee has hybrid working in their contract then the decision to reorganise their life around it is their own responsibility, not the company's.
“Hear me out, what if you might like sticking your hand in a blender?”
I genuinely miss seeing my pals at work and eating lunch with the gang. I genuinely do not miss the commute, the struggle to get things done with a million distractions around me, not having my dog sleeping in her basket underneath my desk in my home office, and seeing my kids before and after school.
There, thought experiment concluded. I didn’t like it.
Hand in the blender can be healed for a few tens of thousands of dollars and a year of rehab probably. Commute to office takes approximately one full month of human life every year, unpaid and uncompensated. So that's actually a very reasonable comparison. It's just most humans are terrible with estimating long term costs and benefits, so they tend to ignore the ridiculously insane cost of commute over whole career.
It's actually not, if you stop and consider the true cost of working and commuting to an office. It's just we're conditioned NOT to consider the true cost, so we externalize a bunch of the costs.
For example, you don't consider the CO2 from your car, or the time spent driving, or the risk of death. If you factor in just the time spent driving, suddenly smoking a pack a day is better for your lifespan than being in an office.
but subtlety is usually lost at the folks here and this comparison will at least be understood. then again - the thought of having to go back to the office is evoking a feeling not too different from anticipating something quite painful. too many colleagues are just unbearable and the waste of time having to commute unpaidly ... maybe i'd prefer a quick blender session for another year of home office even.
Thank you. Sure it was hyperbolic, but it was in response to the notion that maybe we’re all too shortsighted to see that we’d like full time RTO if only we’d try it. There are certain things I don’t need to try before knowing that I won’t enjoy them. I’ve worked in offices enough decades to have sufficient data: I strongly prefer WFH. “Maybe you’ll like it this time!” is weak sauce. I’m not a delicate flower who couldn’t RTO if situations demanded it. I would not help me do a better job for my company, though, and I don’t want to.
This is academic for me. I have an amazing job at a company all-in on WFH to the point we just downsized a physical office we were underusing. I hate seeing my colleagues get dragged back to legacy offices for no compelling reason though.
It is not "uprooting your whole life" to go back to working in the office, unless one was so foolish as to move away from the city their job was in. And yeah in that case it sucks balls, but I don't imagine most people did something that foolish.
Making decisions is not foolish, even if they disagree with your idea of how they should be made. I quit my previous job over RTO, leaving a great team at a cool company. It was a conscious decision with pros and cons carefully weighed.
Pardon me but this is a stupid argument. If OP is working at amazon they’ve already been going three days a week. If they did not like going three days a week why should they like going five days a week?
If you're willing to take lower pay, there are a lot of good options out there.
I took a nearly 50% cut about 5 years ago (a few months before the pandemic) to join a smaller company with a much less stressful environment and a very flexible WFH policy, and I don't regret it at all.
That's a US perspective right? I don't think that exists much in Europe?
I just got a 3 month freelance gig (Netherlands) and even that requires full time on-site for absolutely no reason other than "boss says so". There's also a housing crisis going on and they wonder why they have an open vacancy for literally 6+ months.
I guess it's better to watch it burn than to allow WFH.
That's probably because you're a freelancer, which makes it a point for negotiation business to business.
Employees have a legal right to work from home, so far as is reasonable in their circumstances and their employer's. There is legislation and jurisprudence on that, which makes it a lot less soft than it at first appears. The boss can't just say 'no'.
I believe some of these flexible working request laws mean that companies must consider whether it's reasonable (for the business) and allow it if it's reasonable.
It's fairly toothless in most jurisdictions since businesses can just say it's unreasonable and not elaborate.
They force the employer to give a reason, and that reason has to be "reasonable", i.e. can be fought in courts if it's "that's just how we do it here".
Think so. It's also (sort of) true where I work (Hungary) if you are a parent of a child under the age of 7. It's not so much an automatic right as the right to request alternative work arrangements (home office, flexitime, etc.), and your employer can't just say 'no', they have to demonstrate the reasons that that's not acceptable (whatever arrangement you requested).
There is no legal right to work from home in The Netherlands. The only law we have is that an employer should give you a good reason to work from the office.
Sorry but that’s a fantasy. I live in Germany and that is 100% not the case here. You might be able to negotiate it if you are an especially valuable employee but normally no chance
I agree on the Germany perspective here. Although I may add, from my experience and what I observed on media, the return to office push post Covid wasn’t nearly as extreme here in Germany as it was in the US.
I and my entire department still work mostly from home, with 2-3 days/month onsite. Pre Covid this would have been unimaginable, now there are multiple departments operating this way
Yes, German work/employment culture is a crab barrel where every quality of life improvement has to be fought for tooth and nail.. The Netherlands cemented WFH as a right after the Corona period when it had shown to not negatively impact productivity while positively impacting quality of life for employees.
If we're doing anecdotes, my company in NL lets teams decide on their work schedule, and most people choose WFH 3/5 days, with some people (myself) doing full remote except for some Fridays (Vrijmibo FTW :) ), and some people doing office every day.
As long as we are sharing anecdotes, I can share mine from the Netherlands as well. Employer sanely leaves it to the team to decide how often to work from office. My team decided to work from home but meet at office atleast once in 2 months. There are other teams within the company that works practically 100% at office because they like it, and it makes their job easier.
I do know atleast a few other companies where I worked at or have friends working at in the Netherlands with similar WFH setup.
Yes, US perspective. Many employers here are similarly persnickety about being on-site, but there are also some good ones that are open to remote work and a few that are fully remote.
It's been 10+ years since I did freelance, but I was fully remote then too, FWIW.
> I guess it's better to watch it burn than to allow WFH.
i guess there are a lot of companies have not yet found a way to manage wfh for overall satisfaction, which massively burdens morale and hence they face the decision of doing something or watch it burn.
Idk why Amazon employees aren't unionizing over this. A major AWS outage due to striking employees could hit them where it hurts and make Amazon's management realize how stupid they are to consider this policy change.
I mentioned unionization on my personal social media account and was approached by legal that I should “consider my public statements about my job carefully.”
It is well known that Amazon hires organizations like the Pinkertons to break up unionization efforts at all levels, even going as far as to bait union supporters into signing fake union interest forms on false pretense and then attrition-fire individuals who signed by giving them no hours, pushing them into ineffective or frustrating conditions, PIPs, etc.
The actual answer to your question, besides the fact that all of us SDEs consider ourselves exceptional at our jobs, is that there are a lot of people whose immigration status depends on their job. They can’t strike.
For that and other reasons, Amazon knows they can do what they want.
I would love for labor to get a win, but it’s easy for me to say since I don’t work at Amazon. Someone else should bell the cat.
I just joined Amazon but I’m definitely on board for unionization. Just need to figure out who else is. It seems like the real solution here is a collective unit to bargain with management to say no 5 days is not necessary. And probably get some other benefits too. But given amazons anti-union tactics in the warehouses I can’t imagine they’d be friendly to a corporate union either
>Idk why Amazon employees aren't unionizing over this
Because the people most likely to unionize are exactly the people Amazon dosn't care that much about. If you are a star performer, you are paid gobs of money and treated like royalty. If you're even a decent employee, you make tons of money and are given lots of leeaway.
You join a union, or you join a different company. Or you threaten to, at any rate.
Understand your leverage: job marketplace bargaining power stems from your willingness and ability to do the latter, while structural bargaining power stems from your willingness and ability to strike and/or engage in sabotage.
Would a SWE union push for work from home? I don't know how software unions have fared in the wild so far, or even any other type of engineers union in terms of work-from-home.
The film industry unions famously pushed to centralize all of the industry into a 30mi radius in LA (TMZ- thirty mile zone) [1], so it's totally possible to push for location-specific policies.
The Alphabet Workers Union has been fighting against RTO mandates for a while now, AFAIK. Not super successfully, but they've gotten some extensions and delays a few times.
Presumably if the members prioritized it, that’s what the union would go for… don’t se any particular reason it wouldn’t be a priority. Seems to come up a lot.
If the policy requires S-Team approval, it could be hard at the SDE 3 level, though it should be much easier at the PE level.
If your Director is willing to go to bat, and you have a track record, it’s not unachievable.
TBH, the policy is likely not aimed you…
Though I will say…back in my AWS days, I did gain a bunch from being able to drop into Mark Brooker’s office and ask questions about distributed systems.
I didn’t get always like it… but I learned a lot from it.
If you have a solid performance argument in your favor, make it and see what happens.
I quit when they introduced the 3-days RTO last year. I just called few people that called me for years and landed a new job within a month. It also came with the raise, as I was approaching the cliff.
Just pick on of the competitors of the AWS product you're working on.
Keep working from home until they fire you, while making contingency plans. What are they going to do if many just keep staying home while actually doing work? At the very least this will drag out the resolution of the issue much longer.
That strategy comes with a nonzero chance of having unemployment delayed (fired for cause). So if OP chooses that route, he/she better have a bulletproof reserve and a plan B and plan C if it takes longer than expected to get a new job.
I do think that this is a just strategy, though. If you give 100% of what was contracted, and your colleagues know you are all in on the success of the team, your high functioning team can outlast the winds of change from HR, easy.
This is true if he quits too though, which I thought was the other option being considered. If he wants to just comply and keep working there then this post is unnecessary. Being fired would come much later than quitting. In the mean time he can pursue other jobs too while also calling their bluff that they'll reverse mandate like they've done before.
There is nothing wrong about collecting unemployment insurance if you’re unemployed, regardless of your previous job or salary.
I don’t know where this mind worm of not using programs that were literally made for these circumstances but you are entitled to use them and should collect them.
The company pays for unemployment insurance, if they don’t want to pay their premium rates increasing they shouldn’t have fired people.
Come build systems (TypeScript, Postgres, ElasticSearch, Redis, AWS, Redshift, etc) that improve the lives of the neediest patients in the U.S. healthcare system through the power of behavioral economics.
Hi OP I hope you figure this out. As most folks are saying if you’re a talented Amazon engineer basically you’ll have the “pick of the litter”, companies should be fawning over you. I think you’ll be fine finding new work be it at Microsoft or Google or at a bank like JPMorgan or a startup. Of course be sure they do fully remote before applying or during the process but I think you’ll be fine. You’re a SDE3 at Amazon!
Pivoting to an unrelated thing: do you know the PM for Redshift? I don’t want to shit on the team but Redshift compared to BigQuery or Snowflake sucks.
It’s missing features both at the SQL level and the developer UX level. For example the amount of hoops one has to go through to create an external table against S3 of parquet files is far more involved and annoying than say defining one against GCS on BigQuery.
I’ve tried engaging in conversation with Amazon people on LinkedIn or otherwise to no avail.
I just want to know what the roadmap holds and if there will be more efforts to bring it to parity with its main competitors.
I figured it was a long shot to ask but considering you’re a DB focused dev I thought I’d try.
Talk to your manager and try to explain that it doesn't work for you, try and approach it like it's not reasonable in your case to demand 5 days a week - they talk about whenever humanly possible in the memo, I didn't read it in details, but you might be able to sway the fact that it won't work for you your way.
Do not mention quitting over it though, or you'll definitely go straight into the HR crosshair.
If you're done with Amazon, apply to local startups. Likely you won't get the same kind of money, but you might be happier and "you've got that on your resume".
I left Amazon back when the 3-day RTO was announced. Their recruiters periodically ping and ask if I'd be interested in returning. So leaving on good terms will give you options to return if you want.
I haven't seen a recent who's hiring post, but searching for the most recent one can help you find jobs that are hybrid or remote friendly.
Also the startup I went to after I left is fully remote and hiring, my email is in my profile.
Startups are a great option. Many are remote, have a super high upside, and have interesting projects you can actually be involved in every aspect of. If anyone is interested in the startup I’m at (Vertice AI), shoot me an email at lukew@verticeanalytics.ai - we’re hiring
Depending on your appetite for risk and in/stability, you should not have trouble finding work at a start-up (FT or consulting). Doubly so if your db-focus touches on vector search.
The timing is a tricky one, though. I personally know folks who were able to demand a premium for their past Amazon work experience but that cachet will fade quickly as people start jumping ship over this stupid, regressive policy.
Just put up with it for a while -- then leave when a better opportunity shows itself.
I flew more than half the country to work for a financial institution in NY, and enjoyed it for 2 years. I got to see a different part of the country, and racked up a bunch of frequent flyer miles. Another contracted me, wanted to keep me as a FTE, I told them I wasn't moving. They hired me as a remote worker.
If you would enjoy a fintech and can readily out engineer the average AWS TAM, we're hiring "Work Anywhere" in the U.S. (preference for Americas/New_York TZ for better overlap with UK etc.). We fly you business class to HQ in NYC area for an Mon - Thu about twice a quarter.
You'd be on a small (4-8) capability or service owning team, including investment strategy (quant, strat, ML, discretionary, etc.) domain lead engineers on same team.
We are small enough 'talent density' is still high, and everyone -- even non dev parts of firm -- is a builder.
All companies are returning to 5 days RTO, don't kid yourself. I would just bite the bullet and hold out at AMZN until the job market unfreezes and then jumpship then.
I've been working remotely for 8 years..there are remote jobs out there. Good ones too with good pay. Especially good when you balance for time saved not going to an office and being forced to be "on the job" for 8hrs a day. Shrink that effective wage denominator.
> and being forced to be "on the job" for 8hrs a day. Shrink that effective wage denominator.
I'm in the UK and go to the office once or twice a week. I feel pretty lucky that our company is still very ok with remote work. But then, we're a smallish outfit and many of us put in a fair bit more than 8 hours a day. We're not forced to, but we get paid well for it, so I'm ok with that.
I'm not sure on remote devs, as honestly, biotech isn't really dev heavy (much to it's detriment). I'd look at the larger players in the space for jobs there, as they will likely be working in Canada too and may need help with local law compliance. If you're looking to switch things up, compliance is a very boring but deadly necessary sector of biotech that always needs people. I'll forewarn that the pay is less, though the stability is greater too (but not by all that much).
This may be a good site to keep your finger on the pulse of the industry and to find companies looking for talent.
At the end of the day, you are going to take less salary for a greater sense of mission and purpose. It's not as bad as teaching and nursing, but you're on that slide ruler now. Negotiate hard on starting salary.
If you're entrepreneurial minded, head to your nearest startup meetup/founder networking event and chat to founders. Nearly all the founders are non technical and have the same problem, no tech talent to build their product and no funding to to hire one.
But you could get a significant percentage of the business if you become a co-founder and you would basically have the pick of the bunch.
You probably don't even have to leave amazon if you can smash out a quick prototype over a weekend, then only leave if they get funding and the startup takes off.
This is terrible advice. The non-technical founders who are struggling to find someone to implement their "great idea" are never[0] worth working for. It's not like you'd get a 50% share of the company anyway.
[0]: I'm sure exceptions exist. I've never met one.
Tenuous side-hustles don't get grown and built in a crisis to make a living.
It's far better to have a stable 9-5 gig and then build things on the side intending to grow them, or at least let them validate/bake with other income and/or savings to see where they go.
(from my peers) the MO for those who want to leave seems to be slacking until PIP/Focus/Pivot (for the payout) while looking for outside opportunities. There are a ton of companies out there that meet your criteria, but you’ll have to do some digging. YMMV
I know someone at IC level there who hasn't done actual work in many months. There is literally no work because their old team was cut and they haven't found a new one yet. They are just collecting paychecks until an eventual (hopeful) layoff and severance package.
Some VP's still need to show headcount to justify their own jobs?
I believe this could happen, but find it hard to believe it would last a few months. The systems would auto-assign them a manager. That manager would be getting reports on their productivity, and would have them in their list of people they have to give ratings to. At this point they would have gone through a mid-cycle stack ranking.
Unless their current manager is colluding with them, they would have been ranked into a pip by now.
It's tempting but not really compatible with my personal sense of integrity. I don't judge others though since Amazon has zero integrity.
FWIW, there are lots of comments here calling you a sucker (or saying words to that effect without the name calling), and I'm here to say the opposite.
I think it's good that you have an independent sense of what's 'right' and 'wrong' for you to do, and you follow your internal moral compass on big decisions in your life. Your personal integrity should not depend on the integrity of who/whatever it is you're dealing with.
I'm really torn here. It feels like a good thing for society if everyone has that attitude of "do the right thing".
But I also feel that it's important not to be naive: the sad/harsh reality is that there are people and bodies and organisations out there who will exploit others, and will use their gains to further carry on exploiting.
Now obviously, "exploiting" here is paying huge salaries, shiny offices etc. but I think HN is generally in agreement that Amazon is one of those organisations that regularly oversteps the mark with employee rights/respect.
If we accept that, then I have a really hard time shaking the idea that responding to them making employees lives hard by continuing to perform above average is no different to appeasing an alligator.
What if employers exploit employees because they know there will always be employees who respond to it like this? It kind of makes sense. If we accept that, then all of a sudden "I'm doing the right thing of working hard for my own moral compass" becomes "I'm helping the bad guys because, because it makes me feel better".
Again, I'm aware that thinking about this in terms of "exploitation" and "suckers" is a little extreme, but thinking about it in terms of incentives: isn't this person letting their moral compass incentivise a behaviour they object so much to that they're looking to leave?
edit: for clarity, I do hugely respect working hard for personal motivation of "doing the right thing", and I have taken this approach before. But when I got older, and reflected, I concluded I let my own ego enable things which make the world a worse place, which is a bigger no-no for me personally. It does need to be balanced off against falling into an almost paranoia of "is this person/group just trying to exploit me".
It comes down to voice/exit/loyalty and a lot of people have chosen voice/stay apparently.
Agreed. The game "tit for tat" requires you actually tit if you get a tat. The tit and tat can last a "long time" for the human mind which is not relevant to the game structure. The mind may also "feel bad" about the tit.
> The game "tit for tat" requires you actually tit if you get a tat.
My understanding is that in iterated prisoner's dilemma, "tit for two tats" will often outperform "tit for tat", so in its original setting that's not really the case.
Here in reality, of course, "tit for two tats" can be better exploited if it can be (easily enough) identified and there are more potential ways of doing that.
100% agree. Never compromise on what is part of your character build. It's not about them, it's all about you, your mental health, and your career trajectory.
> Your personal integrity should not depend on the integrity of who/whatever it is you're dealing with
I disagree, because sometimes your integrity might justify their behavior. People do bad things because they think they're good, and they think they're good because people tell them via their actions.
Being a good employee tells amazon their employment policies are fair, and they should continue them. Therefore, IMO, you not only should be a bad employee - you have a duty to be a bad employee.
I couldn't be idle, but it would be tempting to pick up a side gig while they figure if they need my services as an employee.
Personal integrity should not ever be in play when you’re talking about amoral objects like Amazon.
When I command my computer to remove a file, I don’t think about the morality of destroying things. I issue the command and it does it. And I know my computer doesn’t care about personal integrity as it churns through its instructions. Amazon works the same way.
These companies are all lawn mowers, just like Oracle. A lawn mower just cuts grass and does not deserve or respond to things like integrity and personal honor.
While it may be comforting to think you're just sticking it to "Amazon", if you look at almost anything you're doing, you're going to see other people who are really at the other end of this apathy. Whether it's co-workers you're blocking or giving half-effort to, customers being ignored, or the new engineer that is neglected.
Is there some purely "amoral object like Amazon" stuff that's part of it too? Sure. But at least in my experience, folks who are just phoning it in cause real stress for coworkers and others, and that definitely relates to personal integrity.
Man, all of that sounds awful for those coworkers and customers. But it isn't GPs problem. It isn't their company. He doesn't employ them. He isn't responsible for their experience. Put the blame on their poor experience squarely where it belongs: management. Why is shitty management letting some underperformer ruin things? Super convenient to claim personal integrity and shift the blame to the underperformer when management is clearly not demonstrating personal integrity and protecting their team and customers.
That's a good point: demotivating people and making them leave, having all those side effects on bystanders... it's all coming from the management decision.
And this is Amazon, they are normally so careful about mental suffering of coworkers... ...
It is the GP’s problem when this coworkers don’t want to work with them again.
The tech hubs (SF, Seattle, NYC are pretty small communities.
Any place that has hundreds of thousands of tech workers isn't small.
In a town of 50k people you'll die not knowing probably 80% of them.
They are small in a sense and vast in a sense. You may know some people personally but never interact with them at work even though in theory your systems are adjacent.
A company doesn’t physically exist, the reality is people interacting with each others. People are not responsible for others whole experience, but certainly for their actions. You can’t hide behind non-existent things, you are having a real interaction in the real world and impacting real people. Otherwise it leads to systemic evil.
I think the prior commenter’s point might be more clearly stated as “why hold rank and file employees responsible for overall conditions within the company, rather than those actually responsible for overall conditions within the company [management].”
A person doesn’t physically exist. It’s just a bunch of cells interacting with each other. Likewise a cell doesn’t really exist, it’s just a bunch of proteins and lipids, but likewise those are just a bunch of atoms, which are just a bunch of subatomic particles!
Anyhow, corporations exist just as much as any other collective entity and have their own behavioral norms.
What if the system is evil by design? You are already at the "systemic evil" step, from the start.
> Personal integrity should not ever be in play when you’re talking about amoral objects like Amazon.
Personal integrity must always be in play, or else it means nothing.
Do you feel bad about the file you're deleting?
Integrity is as much about the kind of person you want to be as it is about the beneficiary of your treatment.
Don't sell yourself short.
Be a person who treats others a little better than they treat you.
Be a person who isn't fooled into thinking corporations are people.
Corporations are not people. They do not have feelings. You do not need to be nice to them.
I just said that.
A persons conduct says more about their character in situations when they don't need to be nice, when there won't even be any consequence for not being nice.
One could prompt their local LLM with some psychopathic verbal abuse-- "Do it or I drill a hole in your skull!!!" -- you don't need to be nice to the LLM, it doesn't have feelings or memory, etc. The LLM doesn't deserve your kindness or benefit from it. But if you do this often can you really be sure that it will have no effect on how you treat people, or how you think of yourself?
And corporations are a lot more human than some LLM-- they're made of people, they pay people, they buy from people, they're owned by people. Abusing them can harm people, though, sure it doesn't always. You can't always tell when it will harm people, and your reasoning may not be the most unbiased when your own personal benefit is on the other side of the equation.
But even if it didn't matter, that no humans would be hurt. Do you want to push yourself towards the kind of person who will behave in an exploitive way when they can get away with it? Or do you want to be the kind of person who is confident enough in their own merit that they can play life on a slightly harder mode and walk past 'opportunities' that are less obviously upstanding?
People constantly set goals for themselves that go above and beyond what is required of them because it helps develop their skill, their character, or because their wiliness to face the challenge forms part of their identity.
In any case, I'm not judging anyone here-- just offering a different perspective.
There's not much integrity in being a sucker.
However it's not a boolean choice, since OP has a third option: change workplace. Which is exactly what they are seeking to do and demonstrates their integrity.
When theres money on the table you don't have any friends.
> When theres money on the table you don't have any friends.
That's taking it way too far.
I think the important factor is the kind of relationship involved, specifically how does a modern corporation like Amazon view its relationship with you. I'd argue that it's fundamentally sociopathic and exploitative, so it doesn't deserve anything better than what it gives.
Individuals and different kinds of organizations can be deserving of your integrity.
Integrity is about moral vision. Either your moral vision will become moral reality or it will become moral wishfulness. Reality is how you hold your morality accountable as something more than a story you tell yourself.
So on the moral realities of Amazon...
One could argue that the integrity was already lost when they accepted money in exchange for work for a company like Amazon.
As long as the money is worth more than the work, draining Amazon of its savings is arguably a moral good.
Reference:
Bryan Cantrillhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m
> amoral
I thought you meant ‘immoral’, and do believe that word is probably correct, but objectively ‘amoral’ is accurate according to https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/chooseyourwords/amoral-i...
He probably meant amoral. Companies are constructs, machines, outside of morality. They just do. Their leaders can be moral or not.
That is a bit how the Germans did all the nice things during WW2. Just remove personal integrity and go along with the flow.
OP is more like Schindler, who was part of the system but didn't actually produce shells. Schindler was a net negative for the system and most likely a net positive for humanity.
Your computer physically exists, just as your lawn mower. Amazon and Oracle on the other end just exist in our minds. Physically it’s just people interacting with each other. So for me personal integrity depends on each specific interaction.
My hard drive is just magnetic domains, but I still interact with files. Constructs can be interacted with. I can also bang my head on the car door, even though both are actually just atoms.
Seems ironic to be working for a company without integrity, drawing a salary ie your livelihood from such an organization while believing somehow your personal integrity is not already impacted by doing so. The two seem incompatible to an outside observer.
Then don't slack. Keep doing your work at a high level, but from home. Do you not see how this is the optimal strategy?
He'll be fired.
Maybe. Later than if he quits, and maybe not if they reverse their position like they've done a few times already. If he quits right away he's guaranteeing he doesn't have that job.
For what its worth, I largely agree with you. The world shouldn't be about milking everything you can while giving nothing.
employment is just a business transaction, i don't believe people should tie their sense of integrity to how they interact with an organization that would fire you with zero notice and not even tell you why
Integrity doesn't vary based on the actions of other people.
A better move would be to use the networking opportunity to find other high-performance people who don't like the BS, and form a productish-consultingish worker-owned co-op to replace the soulless, erratic corporation with a more stable, humane environment.
Amazon is not people. It has no feelings
I’ve heard if you are on focus when you quit you may have a lifetime ban on ever coming back anywhere in Amazon. Is this correct?
I filed a formal complaint Brian O was breaching fiduciary duty in the 10-K and was subsequently fired unceremoniously for my “performance” by two directors on a call the next morning.
Amazon tried to hire me back 6 months later, from multiple recruiters. My former manager and I had a good laugh that somehow I wasn’t blacklisted.
I wouldn’t worry about it, too much.
Amazon always needs bodies. So whatever ban there is, they will “make an exception”..
Not necessarily for you. To make an example.
There are new people entering the industry all the time, they don’t necessarily need any one given individual again ever.
"Amazon" may not, but the manager, VP, SVP etc may. Careers aren't made by having the right skillset. They're made by having the right set of contacts. YMMV
Sure, but someone leaving on bad terms (especially if they’re relatively junior) isn’t super likely to be one of those people eh? They call it ‘burning bridges’ for a reason.
This may also be the case for URA (unregrettable attribution?). Someone I know left just short of two years for personal reasons, was never put in PIP/Focus, and then they tried joining a new team after and was told when they left their manager put them as URA, which prevents them from coming back. I've heard it can just be a year, though.
Unregretted attrition, which means you no longer work there and you're not sorry about it.
Which means you are the one with the power in the negotiation (the party with the most power is the one who needs the other the least).
So they have a codified sour grapes rule to punish people who they don't have power over? To punish people who weren't begging to please continue being allowed to work there? That is actual insanity right there.
Have you ever dated someone that you can’t quite break up with for whatever reason, and weren’t bad necessarily, but still breath a sigh of relief that it’s over when they dump you?
The work equivalent to that is a URA, for a manager.
If you’re that manager and now ‘single’ (have open headcount) and looking to find someone to ‘date’, would you hire that person back, or go find someone else - even if they were a complete question mark?
If hiring managers/recruiters have more candidates than they can handle, a prior URA can impact a candidate the same way. ‘There are many fish in the sea’
Does that mean you’d never get hired back? Nah, it happens. But it isn’t likely to help.
In that euphemism, the party doing or not doing the regretting is the employer, not the employee.
It sounds more like being fired with cause?
Sounds bizarre to me if true. They did standard two week notice, left documentation of work in flight, hadn't slacked off before leaving, etc.
If the manager had an URA quota to fill, they might have decided to be an asshole and pad their numbers. As retribution, too, perhaps.
My understanding of URA, is that it's when a manager is able to manage a person into leaving the job that they can't justify firing, but really don't want on the team. So then the person leaves, and is flagged as we didn't want to keep them anyway.
I have seen this prove to be false multiple times. The reasonable falloff is ~5Y.
Yes
"There are a ton of companies out there that meet your criteria"
But are any of them hiring, and what are the odds of being hired? The market is trash right now. If it wasn't, Amazon wouldn't have pulled this shit.
A thought experiment, something you may not want to hear. Have you thought of playing along and see if you would actually like going back to office full time? Also, while you are at office 5 days a week, how about try to get to the next level before you switch? Many will leave (just like you are planning to) and hence it will be easier for the long timers to get promoted in an environment where there will be a lot of inflow of new employees at all levels.
I am not suggesting that this is the right way to think about your situation, but that it is 'another way' to think about it. Who knows, you might end up profiting from this adversity. Wish you all the best!
It’s not always that easy. Many people over the last few years have reorganised their life under the expectation of continued hybrid working, and can’t trivially reorganise it back to full time.
I am one of these naive people who expected happy home office forever. It bit me hard, because I bought an old house outside of big city and spent the time I would need to commute renovating it. The return to the office happened, I quit. The other place was weird. It advertised generous home office ruling. But under very special manager home office was forbidden. It was just too stupid to file a complaint to HR and I left. So my construction site was stuck for 1,5 years and it was very stressful.
Found by accident a job near my home. Small company with private office for me and unlimited home office ruling. Use home office only when I am ill. During this period I found out, that I absolutely love my private office and hate daily commuting and open offices.
I remember being surprised during the pandemic just how many people were uprooting their lives and moving to remote locations. Even though there has been a trend towards remote work over the previous decade I always thought there would be a bounce back and some of those people would be stuffed.
That seems like it was a mistake. WFH was supposed to be temporary during the pandemic. Not sure what people were thinking…
"supposed to" depends on the company. The company I was working at announced immediately that we were work from home forever. They canceled leases on over a dozen offices across the world and let us come in and take the old furniture.
> It’s not always that easy
Where did they say it was easy?
They said maybe try going back to the office and seeing if you like it.
Heresy here on HN, I know.
> Many people over the last few years have reorganised their life under the expectation of continued hybrid working
Why should an employer bear the burden of an employee's own poor decision making?
because it's true the other way
But you're not forced to work for a company that wants you in the office, you're free to seek employment elsewhere that matches your remote requirements similar how a company isn't forced to hire remote workers only. You are both free to choose the best options that fit your demands if you can find them.
Jobs and employers aren't for life. If you uprooted and reorganize your whole life based on the circumstances of a once in a lifetime global pandemic expecting things to stay like that forever, you've done goofed.
That’s not a good take. Compare/contrast: “but you’re not forced to work for a company that wants you to work in hazardous conditions without safety gear”. That’s far different from RTO, but the point is that there’s a huge power imbalance here and it’s not as simple as saying “don’t work there if you’re not happy with […]”.
IMHO, yours is not a good take. I get it, I also like to WFH if I can instead of commuting, but working from the office is not the same as working with hazardous substances both legally and as a apples to apples take.
Working in hazardous environments is outlawed (unless proper care is taken), working from the office is not outlawed. If you want working from the office to be outlawed as a health hazard you'll have to convince the government to do that as part of OHSA and labor laws but good luck getting any workers' sympathy that commuting to work in your cushy air conditioned office is not to your taste from the likes of those doing landscaping or roofing.
Otherwise we can stretch the definition endlessly to working with Windows, Agile, Scrum, Teams and Jira is a health hazard and should be also outlawed because I just don't like them, but me not liking something is not enough to make it outlawed.
Yep, those are indeed not the same thing, and that’s why I said they’re not the same thing. The point was that “if you don’t like it, leave” is a terrible reply to any complaint about a working environment. Especially when things like insurance are bizarrely tied to employment, a huge portion of people can’t just leave.
>“if you don’t like it, leave” is a terrible reply to any complaint about a working environment.
Why is it a terrible reply? What should you do if you don't like your job? What's your point here?
Most people on the planet do jobs they don't like, welcome to reality. Otherwise we'd all be racecar drivers, twitch streamers, musicians and painters and get paid for our hobbies, but that's not how it works for most people.
We do a job not because we always like it or like everything about it, we do it to pay for food, shelter and if money allows, to afford hobbies and leisure that make life nice. Venting on the internet won't improve societal issues or issues you have at your job, it's still up to you to change your situation to what fits you because nobody will do it for you.
> because nobody will do it for you
That's not true - you just talked about OSHA. What did they do before that? They did what you advocate - they left, or maybe lost a hand or two. Then we got this codified and boom! Now somebody else does it for you (thank god).
It's not just about like/dislike. There are real impacts. Thousands of tons of CO2, lives lost in car accidents, countless human lifespans wasted on a commute. These are real impact that you, yes YOU, will face head on.
Friendly reminder that remote work in IT was a thing way before the pandemic. I for one started working from home full time in 2015.
Also your approach seems to be to just accept whatever employers throw at you. Have you considered that they might be colluding (in a sense) to deprive you of options?
I would like to know a rational reason why I should spend so much of my day travelling.
>Also your approach seems to be to just accept whatever employers throw at you.
Where do you see me saying such a thing?
>I would like to know a rational reason why I should spend so much of my day travelling.
Companies say it's for "better collaboration". You would do it if you had no other options if every potential employer would require you to be on site depriving you of remote options, but because the market is in your favor giving you options, it's difficult for you to empathize with the other situation.
> Where do you see me saying such a thing?
Your solution appears to be "choose a different employer" without any hint of "demand more from the current employer".
> You would do it if you had no other options if every potential employer would require you to be on site depriving you of remote options, but because the market is in your favor giving you options, it's difficult for you to empathize with the other situation.
You assume something that's not the case. I am of the opinion that everyone who can, should have this option regardless of the market situation and I think it's terrible people are forced to commute. It's like paid leave or health insurance - an achievement in workers' rights.
>Your solution appears to be "choose a different employer" without any hint of "demand more from the current employer".
That's only what you implied, not what I said. If simply demanding stuff from your current employer would just work then there wouldn't be so many unhappy workers everywhere. But that's not it works in the real world. The only language employers understand is the "F you, I quit" part.
>I am of the opinion that everyone who can, should have this option regardless of the market situation
That's nice but how do you propose that to happen? Did you see any workers rioting on the streets to have remote work as a guaranteed labor right? No? Then you can forget about it.
All rights and perk that labor currently has, like the 8h workday, free healthcare, paid vacation days, paid sick leave, have been won only through blood and conflict. It's not like your government is ever gonna hold a referendum and ask workers how many paid vacation days do you want to have and everyone gets to choose. If you want change you need to fight for it, physically with violent force, otherwise you'll be at the mercy of the "free market" which may or may not be in your favor depending how the wind blows. Perks aren't just gonna fall out of the sky for the working class, ever. The covid years were a fluke.
>If you want change you need to fight for it, physically with violent force, otherwise you'll be at the mercy of the "free market" which may or may not be in your favor depending how the wind blows. Perks aren't just gonna fall out of the sky for the working class, ever. The covid years were a fluke.
Which I think is very unfortunate, because working from home is a huge benefit to people who want to, while not being an actual cost to employers (in my opinion, not in theirs).
The part I'm struggling to understand, and please be honest here, is you almost sound a little smug that people are being made to return to the office. Maybe you have a good reason for that, or maybe I'm misreading your tone?
> But that's not it works in the real world.
Of course it does - at least wherever unions exist.
> Perks aren't just gonna fall out of the sky for the working class, ever.
That's defeatist. There are ways beyond violence and you're allowed to negotiate the terms of your employment.
I occasionally got perks from my employers because I was the only person who asked.
Also there's the less popular route - voting. Where I'm from actually helped over the years.
Not sure why you're being downvoted. Unless the employee has hybrid working in their contract then the decision to reorganise their life around it is their own responsibility, not the company's.
> A thought experiment
> Have you thought of playing along and see if you would actually like going back to office full time
That is not a thought experiment. That is a "uproot your whole life" experiment.
“Hear me out, what if you might like sticking your hand in a blender?”
I genuinely miss seeing my pals at work and eating lunch with the gang. I genuinely do not miss the commute, the struggle to get things done with a million distractions around me, not having my dog sleeping in her basket underneath my desk in my home office, and seeing my kids before and after school.
There, thought experiment concluded. I didn’t like it.
Comparing working from the office to sticking your hand in a blender is such an absurd hyperbole that it completely discredits your argument.
Hand in the blender can be healed for a few tens of thousands of dollars and a year of rehab probably. Commute to office takes approximately one full month of human life every year, unpaid and uncompensated. So that's actually a very reasonable comparison. It's just most humans are terrible with estimating long term costs and benefits, so they tend to ignore the ridiculously insane cost of commute over whole career.
> absurd hyperbole
It's actually not, if you stop and consider the true cost of working and commuting to an office. It's just we're conditioned NOT to consider the true cost, so we externalize a bunch of the costs.
For example, you don't consider the CO2 from your car, or the time spent driving, or the risk of death. If you factor in just the time spent driving, suddenly smoking a pack a day is better for your lifespan than being in an office.
but subtlety is usually lost at the folks here and this comparison will at least be understood. then again - the thought of having to go back to the office is evoking a feeling not too different from anticipating something quite painful. too many colleagues are just unbearable and the waste of time having to commute unpaidly ... maybe i'd prefer a quick blender session for another year of home office even.
Thank you. Sure it was hyperbolic, but it was in response to the notion that maybe we’re all too shortsighted to see that we’d like full time RTO if only we’d try it. There are certain things I don’t need to try before knowing that I won’t enjoy them. I’ve worked in offices enough decades to have sufficient data: I strongly prefer WFH. “Maybe you’ll like it this time!” is weak sauce. I’m not a delicate flower who couldn’t RTO if situations demanded it. I would not help me do a better job for my company, though, and I don’t want to.
This is academic for me. I have an amazing job at a company all-in on WFH to the point we just downsized a physical office we were underusing. I hate seeing my colleagues get dragged back to legacy offices for no compelling reason though.
It is not "uprooting your whole life" to go back to working in the office, unless one was so foolish as to move away from the city their job was in. And yeah in that case it sucks balls, but I don't imagine most people did something that foolish.
Many people were hired as remote hires.
seems more like very smart to do such a thing - but sometimes even smart decisions just don't work out.
So buying own home/apartment to live in is a "foolish" idea now, right?
> unless one was so foolish
Making decisions is not foolish, even if they disagree with your idea of how they should be made. I quit my previous job over RTO, leaving a great team at a cool company. It was a conscious decision with pros and cons carefully weighed.
Amazon already has 3 days in-office requirement
Pardon me but this is a stupid argument. If OP is working at amazon they’ve already been going three days a week. If they did not like going three days a week why should they like going five days a week?
If you're willing to take lower pay, there are a lot of good options out there.
I took a nearly 50% cut about 5 years ago (a few months before the pandemic) to join a smaller company with a much less stressful environment and a very flexible WFH policy, and I don't regret it at all.
That's a US perspective right? I don't think that exists much in Europe?
I just got a 3 month freelance gig (Netherlands) and even that requires full time on-site for absolutely no reason other than "boss says so". There's also a housing crisis going on and they wonder why they have an open vacancy for literally 6+ months.
I guess it's better to watch it burn than to allow WFH.
That's probably because you're a freelancer, which makes it a point for negotiation business to business.
Employees have a legal right to work from home, so far as is reasonable in their circumstances and their employer's. There is legislation and jurisprudence on that, which makes it a lot less soft than it at first appears. The boss can't just say 'no'.
You have, in some countries, the legal right "to request" work from home under laws typically aimed at flexible working. But that's it.
A company can, for any reasonable reason, decline the request.
> You have, in some countries, the legal right "to request" work from home under laws typically aimed at flexible working. But that's it.
I would think, generally speaking, you have the right to request anything of anyone anywhere. Do those laws do anything?
I believe some of these flexible working request laws mean that companies must consider whether it's reasonable (for the business) and allow it if it's reasonable.
It's fairly toothless in most jurisdictions since businesses can just say it's unreasonable and not elaborate.
They force the employer to give a reason, and that reason has to be "reasonable", i.e. can be fought in courts if it's "that's just how we do it here".
The idea behind those laws is you cannot be fired for asking this.
Probably forcing the creation of a paper trail for possible future litigation
Most cases do have some notable restrictions on that.
For instance, requesting sex in exchange for money is illegal in most places.
Requesting someone commit a crime on your behalf in exchange for money or other compensation as well (conspiracy, usually).
Several other examples too - requesting someone fix their prices, agree to not compete with you in exchange for the same, etc.
Where is this legal right to work from home? It does not exist in Germany as well as in couple northern countries. Is this a thing for Netherlands?
Think so. It's also (sort of) true where I work (Hungary) if you are a parent of a child under the age of 7. It's not so much an automatic right as the right to request alternative work arrangements (home office, flexitime, etc.), and your employer can't just say 'no', they have to demonstrate the reasons that that's not acceptable (whatever arrangement you requested).
There is no legal right to work from home in The Netherlands. The only law we have is that an employer should give you a good reason to work from the office.
> Employees have a legal right to work from home
Sorry but that’s a fantasy. I live in Germany and that is 100% not the case here. You might be able to negotiate it if you are an especially valuable employee but normally no chance
I agree on the Germany perspective here. Although I may add, from my experience and what I observed on media, the return to office push post Covid wasn’t nearly as extreme here in Germany as it was in the US.
I and my entire department still work mostly from home, with 2-3 days/month onsite. Pre Covid this would have been unimaginable, now there are multiple departments operating this way
Yes, German work/employment culture is a crab barrel where every quality of life improvement has to be fought for tooth and nail.. The Netherlands cemented WFH as a right after the Corona period when it had shown to not negatively impact productivity while positively impacting quality of life for employees.
"Employees have a legal right to work from home,"
We're just making shit up now, huh
If we're doing anecdotes, my company in NL lets teams decide on their work schedule, and most people choose WFH 3/5 days, with some people (myself) doing full remote except for some Fridays (Vrijmibo FTW :) ), and some people doing office every day.
Which to me is the sane option.
As long as we are sharing anecdotes, I can share mine from the Netherlands as well. Employer sanely leaves it to the team to decide how often to work from office. My team decided to work from home but meet at office atleast once in 2 months. There are other teams within the company that works practically 100% at office because they like it, and it makes their job easier.
I do know atleast a few other companies where I worked at or have friends working at in the Netherlands with similar WFH setup.
Yes, US perspective. Many employers here are similarly persnickety about being on-site, but there are also some good ones that are open to remote work and a few that are fully remote.
It's been 10+ years since I did freelance, but I was fully remote then too, FWIW.
There are definitely jobs that allow WFH in the Netherlands. And there are loads that allow some hybrid form.
> I guess it's better to watch it burn than to allow WFH.
i guess there are a lot of companies have not yet found a way to manage wfh for overall satisfaction, which massively burdens morale and hence they face the decision of doing something or watch it burn.
Idk why Amazon employees aren't unionizing over this. A major AWS outage due to striking employees could hit them where it hurts and make Amazon's management realize how stupid they are to consider this policy change.
Former AWS here.
I mentioned unionization on my personal social media account and was approached by legal that I should “consider my public statements about my job carefully.”
It is well known that Amazon hires organizations like the Pinkertons to break up unionization efforts at all levels, even going as far as to bait union supporters into signing fake union interest forms on false pretense and then attrition-fire individuals who signed by giving them no hours, pushing them into ineffective or frustrating conditions, PIPs, etc.
How are they not brought up on charges for this?
They are: https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/03/amazon-un...
The actual answer to your question, besides the fact that all of us SDEs consider ourselves exceptional at our jobs, is that there are a lot of people whose immigration status depends on their job. They can’t strike.
For that and other reasons, Amazon knows they can do what they want.
I would love for labor to get a win, but it’s easy for me to say since I don’t work at Amazon. Someone else should bell the cat.
Let them try to run the operation on a skeleton crew.
I just joined Amazon but I’m definitely on board for unionization. Just need to figure out who else is. It seems like the real solution here is a collective unit to bargain with management to say no 5 days is not necessary. And probably get some other benefits too. But given amazons anti-union tactics in the warehouses I can’t imagine they’d be friendly to a corporate union either
Because the vast majority of Amazon employees love the paychecks. In the end, private company = private rules.
Also, Amazon is never going to count hours, so people are going to do the same thing they are doing now - come in for a few hours and peace out.
>Idk why Amazon employees aren't unionizing over this
Because the people most likely to unionize are exactly the people Amazon dosn't care that much about. If you are a star performer, you are paid gobs of money and treated like royalty. If you're even a decent employee, you make tons of money and are given lots of leeaway.
It's the rest who are the loudest complainers.
You join a union, or you join a different company. Or you threaten to, at any rate.
Understand your leverage: job marketplace bargaining power stems from your willingness and ability to do the latter, while structural bargaining power stems from your willingness and ability to strike and/or engage in sabotage.
Would a SWE union push for work from home? I don't know how software unions have fared in the wild so far, or even any other type of engineers union in terms of work-from-home.
The film industry unions famously pushed to centralize all of the industry into a 30mi radius in LA (TMZ- thirty mile zone) [1], so it's totally possible to push for location-specific policies.
The Alphabet Workers Union has been fighting against RTO mandates for a while now, AFAIK. Not super successfully, but they've gotten some extensions and delays a few times.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_zone
Presumably if the members prioritized it, that’s what the union would go for… don’t se any particular reason it wouldn’t be a priority. Seems to come up a lot.
At the very least, I think one would push against nopen office floorplans.
Have you had a conversation with your manager?
If the policy requires S-Team approval, it could be hard at the SDE 3 level, though it should be much easier at the PE level.
If your Director is willing to go to bat, and you have a track record, it’s not unachievable.
TBH, the policy is likely not aimed you…
Though I will say…back in my AWS days, I did gain a bunch from being able to drop into Mark Brooker’s office and ask questions about distributed systems.
I didn’t get always like it… but I learned a lot from it.
If you have a solid performance argument in your favor, make it and see what happens.
Worse case, they say “no” and you leave anyways.
> Worse case, they say “no” and you leave anyways.
If they say no, for some it puts self-imposed (imaginary) pressure to leave as soon as possible and that can lead to accepting mediocre offers.
It's better to try this only if you are someone who can give enough time for job search in case of a rejection and not rush things.
I quit when they introduced the 3-days RTO last year. I just called few people that called me for years and landed a new job within a month. It also came with the raise, as I was approaching the cliff.
Just pick on of the competitors of the AWS product you're working on.
Keep working from home until they fire you, while making contingency plans. What are they going to do if many just keep staying home while actually doing work? At the very least this will drag out the resolution of the issue much longer.
That strategy comes with a nonzero chance of having unemployment delayed (fired for cause). So if OP chooses that route, he/she better have a bulletproof reserve and a plan B and plan C if it takes longer than expected to get a new job.
I do think that this is a just strategy, though. If you give 100% of what was contracted, and your colleagues know you are all in on the success of the team, your high functioning team can outlast the winds of change from HR, easy.
This is true if he quits too though, which I thought was the other option being considered. If he wants to just comply and keep working there then this post is unnecessary. Being fired would come much later than quitting. In the mean time he can pursue other jobs too while also calling their bluff that they'll reverse mandate like they've done before.
If you get fired from your 6 figure cushy engineering job and need that unemployment, what are you even doing..
There is nothing wrong about collecting unemployment insurance if you’re unemployed, regardless of your previous job or salary.
I don’t know where this mind worm of not using programs that were literally made for these circumstances but you are entitled to use them and should collect them.
The company pays for unemployment insurance, if they don’t want to pay their premium rates increasing they shouldn’t have fired people.
Shameless plug, I suppose: https://www.wellthapp.com/careers
Most of our engineers are WFH 3-5 days per week.
Come build systems (TypeScript, Postgres, ElasticSearch, Redis, AWS, Redshift, etc) that improve the lives of the neediest patients in the U.S. healthcare system through the power of behavioral economics.
Hi OP I hope you figure this out. As most folks are saying if you’re a talented Amazon engineer basically you’ll have the “pick of the litter”, companies should be fawning over you. I think you’ll be fine finding new work be it at Microsoft or Google or at a bank like JPMorgan or a startup. Of course be sure they do fully remote before applying or during the process but I think you’ll be fine. You’re a SDE3 at Amazon!
Pivoting to an unrelated thing: do you know the PM for Redshift? I don’t want to shit on the team but Redshift compared to BigQuery or Snowflake sucks.
It’s missing features both at the SQL level and the developer UX level. For example the amount of hoops one has to go through to create an external table against S3 of parquet files is far more involved and annoying than say defining one against GCS on BigQuery.
I’ve tried engaging in conversation with Amazon people on LinkedIn or otherwise to no avail.
I just want to know what the roadmap holds and if there will be more efforts to bring it to parity with its main competitors.
I figured it was a long shot to ask but considering you’re a DB focused dev I thought I’d try.
Talk to your manager and try to explain that it doesn't work for you, try and approach it like it's not reasonable in your case to demand 5 days a week - they talk about whenever humanly possible in the memo, I didn't read it in details, but you might be able to sway the fact that it won't work for you your way.
Do not mention quitting over it though, or you'll definitely go straight into the HR crosshair.
If you're done with Amazon, apply to local startups. Likely you won't get the same kind of money, but you might be happier and "you've got that on your resume".
I left Amazon back when the 3-day RTO was announced. Their recruiters periodically ping and ask if I'd be interested in returning. So leaving on good terms will give you options to return if you want.
I haven't seen a recent who's hiring post, but searching for the most recent one can help you find jobs that are hybrid or remote friendly.
Also the startup I went to after I left is fully remote and hiring, my email is in my profile.
We’re hiring for these roles, fully remote. Email is in my profile.
Startups are a great option. Many are remote, have a super high upside, and have interesting projects you can actually be involved in every aspect of. If anyone is interested in the startup I’m at (Vertice AI), shoot me an email at lukew@verticeanalytics.ai - we’re hiring
Depending on your appetite for risk and in/stability, you should not have trouble finding work at a start-up (FT or consulting). Doubly so if your db-focus touches on vector search.
The timing is a tricky one, though. I personally know folks who were able to demand a premium for their past Amazon work experience but that cachet will fade quickly as people start jumping ship over this stupid, regressive policy.
Unpopular opinion maybe...
Just put up with it for a while -- then leave when a better opportunity shows itself.
I flew more than half the country to work for a financial institution in NY, and enjoyed it for 2 years. I got to see a different part of the country, and racked up a bunch of frequent flyer miles. Another contracted me, wanted to keep me as a FTE, I told them I wasn't moving. They hired me as a remote worker.
Palantir and Microsoft are north remote friendly and based in Seattle.
Palantir explicitly enables sketchy corporations and unfriendly regimes in doing mildly annoying to very bad things.
lol what’s on the “mildly annoying” end?
Yeah but then you have to work for Palantir.
Afaik netflix and Microsoft is remote.
MS is hardly remote. Lots of people being asked to come back. Just not a blanket statement like Amazon.
Who is being asked to come back?
Yet.
If you would enjoy a fintech and can readily out engineer the average AWS TAM, we're hiring "Work Anywhere" in the U.S. (preference for Americas/New_York TZ for better overlap with UK etc.). We fly you business class to HQ in NYC area for an Mon - Thu about twice a quarter.
You'd be on a small (4-8) capability or service owning team, including investment strategy (quant, strat, ML, discretionary, etc.) domain lead engineers on same team.
We are small enough 'talent density' is still high, and everyone -- even non dev parts of firm -- is a builder.
All companies are returning to 5 days RTO, don't kid yourself. I would just bite the bullet and hold out at AMZN until the job market unfreezes and then jumpship then.
I've been working remotely for 8 years..there are remote jobs out there. Good ones too with good pay. Especially good when you balance for time saved not going to an office and being forced to be "on the job" for 8hrs a day. Shrink that effective wage denominator.
> and being forced to be "on the job" for 8hrs a day. Shrink that effective wage denominator.
I'm in the UK and go to the office once or twice a week. I feel pretty lucky that our company is still very ok with remote work. But then, we're a smallish outfit and many of us put in a fair bit more than 8 hours a day. We're not forced to, but we get paid well for it, so I'm ok with that.
I'm in biotech and WFH is here to stay in this industry, for what it's worth.
I really want to get into it, but 99% of opportunities seem to be in the US. Does biotech hire Canadian devs to work remotely?
Most of it is in San Diego or Boston, really.
I'm not sure on remote devs, as honestly, biotech isn't really dev heavy (much to it's detriment). I'd look at the larger players in the space for jobs there, as they will likely be working in Canada too and may need help with local law compliance. If you're looking to switch things up, compliance is a very boring but deadly necessary sector of biotech that always needs people. I'll forewarn that the pay is less, though the stability is greater too (but not by all that much).
https://www.biospace.com/news
This may be a good site to keep your finger on the pulse of the industry and to find companies looking for talent.
At the end of the day, you are going to take less salary for a greater sense of mission and purpose. It's not as bad as teaching and nursing, but you're on that slide ruler now. Negotiate hard on starting salary.
If you're entrepreneurial minded, head to your nearest startup meetup/founder networking event and chat to founders. Nearly all the founders are non technical and have the same problem, no tech talent to build their product and no funding to to hire one.
But you could get a significant percentage of the business if you become a co-founder and you would basically have the pick of the bunch.
You probably don't even have to leave amazon if you can smash out a quick prototype over a weekend, then only leave if they get funding and the startup takes off.
This is terrible advice. The non-technical founders who are struggling to find someone to implement their "great idea" are never[0] worth working for. It's not like you'd get a 50% share of the company anyway.
[0]: I'm sure exceptions exist. I've never met one.
Never build a product for some random non technical founder
Tenuous side-hustles don't get grown and built in a crisis to make a living.
It's far better to have a stable 9-5 gig and then build things on the side intending to grow them, or at least let them validate/bake with other income and/or savings to see where they go.
Have you ever seen anyone do this to success?
vomit.
if you're going to do that, launching your own SaaS product is better
Downsize and move closer to the office
You should definitely quit!
they figured you have no where to go